[Tagging] Deprecation of landuse=forest (was: Feature Proposal - RFC - boundary=forest(_compartment) relations)

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

I have looked at this for the first time today.

Before, judging from the subject line, I thought: Ok, someone wants to 
map some forest details, I'm fine with that.

Now I find out that instead someone wants to deprecate landuse=forest 
which is used over half a million times in my country - basically for 
anything that has trees on it but is not completely unmanaged.

It was certainly not the intention of the original author, but I do feel 
a little tricked here. Saying clearly that you want to get rid of 
landuse=forest would have made me look at this more closely!

I have now voted against the proposal. In my eyes, mapping boundaries 
(and sub-boundaries) of managed forests is a niche interest. For me as a 
non-forestry-expert, I'm mainly interested in where trees are and where 
no trees are. I don't care much for whether an area is theoretically 
under forestry management or not. There is room in OSM for niche 
interests, I have no problem with that, but I won't let a niche interest 
tell me that half a million forests in Germany need to be re-tagged now 
(and possibly even with some fuzziness along the borders, like "uh the 
managed area ends here, yes there are still trees after that but those 
are not part of the forestry area" and stuff like that).

I'm sorry for not chiming in earlier, I would have if the subject had 
told me that the plan is to get rid of landuse=forest altogether.

https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Talk:Proposed_features/boundary%3Dforestry(_compartment)_relations

Bye
Frederik

-- 
Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org  ##  N49°00'09" E008°23'33"